Transmitting from the Mojave Wilderness in Joshua Tree, California, now is the time for Desert Oracle Radio.

The Voice of the Desert.

Night has fallen on the desert.

I was driving through Inzebrego

Down the Salton Seaway, Aucatio

Nothing fun

Some family business, just taking the scenic route back.

My occasional reminder

why I've landed up here in the high desert.

Far Why I've landed up here in the high desert. Far from that grim border scene that just keeps growing upward and outward a cancer by choice year after year, long before the current outrages, that militarized hell zone.

Now, my dad, who has been gone a long time now, more than a quarter century, he used to have some wild stories.

He grew up on the south side of Phoenix with his twin brother and their dad,

who was a union steward at the Goodyear factory, Westetown.

That's a suburb called Goodyear now,

full of those enormous tract-house boxes

on a little sliver of gravel and concrete.

They had come from a little coal company town

called Wayland, in eastern Kentucky, named after the coal company town called Wayland in eastern Kentucky named after the

coal company boss. How'd you like that to live and die in a place named for your boss?

You ever hear that song 16 tons about wage labor, coal miners who owe their life to the company's

store? The coal company did not just own your place of work, your employment, and all the

mountain land they destroyed and polluted all around you. And your crappy little shack on the highway where the coal trucks and coal trains rumbled by all day and night.

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